The invention relates to apparatus and process for generating content.
The Internet is becoming an increasingly popular medium for communicating and publishing widely accessible documents. A network of networks, the Internet transfers information using a common protocol that tells computers connected to the network how to locate and exchange files with one another. Documents communicated over the Internet generally conform to a Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that a World-Wide-Web (WWW or Web) browser can translate and display. Once posted on a Web server, these documents or compilations of pages can be retrieved and viewed by anyone who has access to the Internet.
Each document is essentially a collection of HTML codes or tags which provide the document with a general structure of a head and a body, as well as headings, format controls, forms, tables, and one or more element types. A basic familiarity with HTML codes is only one aspect in the process of creating HTML documents. Another issue relates to the process of editing such documents. Although a conventional text editor or word processor can be used to add HTML markups to the document, such method of composing and editing the HTML document is quite tedious as the process does not allow a designer to see the document as actually displayed by the browser. Without visual feedback, the process of composing and editing the HTML document can be error-prone and inefficient. Moreover, when the HTML document contains elements other than the usual text and text formatting codes, the process of composing and editing the HTML document can be challenging. For example, if the image elements were embedded in the document, the conventional text editor or word processor would reference each image using only its access path and file name. Consequently, the designer has to be more careful and more exact in selecting the elements, as the designer cannot visually verify that the correct image is being edited. Hence, the difficulty in generating the desired HTML document is increased when non-text elements are embedded in the document.
The difficulty is particularly accentuated for the development of web sites in which the content or interaction of the web site changes based on designer or environmental information. Examples of such sites include on-line catalogs, news sites, or e-commerce sites.
Typically, to support dynamic web sites, a web server called a dynamic content server processes pages to insert or replace content at run-time. Examples include Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), which processes Active Server Pages (ASP).
Currently, web sites are generally authored in two steps:
(1) A designer creates the look and feel of the web site by creating a mock-up of the site in Photoshop.
(2) The Photoshop image is then handed to programmers who hand-code the web pages in HTML and script code to be executed by a content server.
This two-step process is caused by the fact that WYSIWYG HTML editors are insufficiently expressive to show what the designer wants, and; that existing content specification systems generally imbed processing instructions directly within the HTML, making it hard for them to co-exist with WYSIWYG HTML editors. An example of these processing instructions is exemplified by the following Active Server Page (ASP) code
<BODY><%set patents = CreateObject(“ADODB.RecordSet”)patents.Open “myPatentDatabase”%><TABLE><TR><TH>Title</TH><TH>Description</TH></TR><% while not patents.EOF %><TR><TD><%=patents(“PATENT_TITLE”)%></TD><TD><%=patents(“SHORT_DESCRIPTION”)%></TD></TR><% patents.MoveNext %>
This two-step process is inefficient since the page is in effect designed twice: once in Photoshop, and once in HTML file. Moreover, the designer cannot go back and make changes to the HTML file, because the ASP code cannot be easily read back into a WYSIWYG editor since ASP is a language-independent framework designed by Microsoft for efficient coding of server-side scripts that are executed by a Web server in response to a user's request for a URL. ASP scripts are similar to other server-side scripting such as Perl and Python. Not surprisingly, although many people can design web pages, only a few designers can compose web sites with ease.